The Best Remarketing CTAs

Trying to keep data “blind” yet still provide value, the 4 best Calls to Action in a B2B remarketing program are (again, in no order, for same reason above):

1. Watch an on demand webinar
2. Download a whitepaper
3. Attend a live product demo
4. Apply for a discount (ie, free product, discounted product, etc.)

Make sense?  Are you surprised?  Are you doing any remarketing?  Are you thinking about WHAT you want your user to do instead of what your button looks like?

Speak with you soon.  DC

IT Guy vs NonITGuy - Sound Familiar?

An oldie but still a goodie. Note the initial page in his browser when he opens it up...enjoy.
Speak with you soon. DC

10 Reasons Why Marketing Automation Fails [Manticore]

Im normally not a fan of vendor endorsements (although this will be my 2nd this week!), these guys are spot on. Its not rocket science but its still amazing how little process and measurement actually makes its way into today marketing departments.
Speak with you soon. DC

10 Reasons Why Marketing Automation Fails

View more presentations from Manticore Technology.

My First Product Review – its a short one

My only qualification to review any software is exclusively as an end user. Yet with less than 7 days of use, I’m already an advocate of Xobni.

The tool is a simple, lightweight add-on to my work instance of Outlook, and simply put, this tool is slick for 3 reasons:

1. At my fingertips and in a visible format, I can access threaded conversations from my top contacts (ie, Boss, Team Lead, Wife)


2. Relevant files AND contact info are extracted and grouped so I don’t have to hunt and peck, open app then open file, DT search, etc


3. I can quickly add highly relevant contacts to my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts

If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend it. Commercial versions are available, too.

Speak with you soon. DC

Do You Believe?

CO2 debate roars on.
As a trained former environmental engineer, I think some data supports this, but clearly other data refute the trend.
As a trained finance professional, the investment opportunity is staggering, particularly given the hype and potential for short term gain.
As a practicing marketeer, XPLANE blew my doors off again.
Speak with you soon. DC

Remarketing Math for Marketers

Ive been asked, "why remarket?" I say, "the math tells me to do so." Beyond the intuition - its cheaper to market to previously qualifed leads than to start cold - however, remarketing is most powerful if you have fairly decent control of your lead gen process and are comfortable with your base conversion metrics, especially lead -> opportunity -> sale.

For example, consider this baseline:
For a 60 day campaign, 100 leads are acquired for $100 ea (typical B2B), converting 10% to opportunity, which ultimately convert to 2 deals. If ASP is $25K, then the contribution margin for this campaign is $40K. CPL is $100 and CPO is $1K. A winner.

By remarketing to this same list, and assuming the same 10% opportunity conversion (which is fairly easy to do simply by offering a different CTA), the 9 additional opportunities deliver a whopping 47% CPO reduction to the campaign (CPO from $1K to $526)! Ive assumed the cost to email and revamp CTA are negligible, which they are! Will these 9 convert to additional deals? If so, watch your campaign contribution margin go through the roof with each successive remarketing event.

And without going into the heavy financial analysis, assume that remarketing also delivers more OPPORTUNITIES more quickly, so assuming a reasonable discount rate, the campaign ROI improvement becomes even more amazing.

Remarketing doesnt require heavy math or expensive technology. Like most effective things in marketing, it requires planning, testing, measuring, and improvement.

Speak with you soon. DC

Remarketing & Lead Nurturing: 3 Lessons Learned

I still try to offer practical, hands on tips for the technology marketer and this is a powerful set! Assuming you use a remarketing tool to automate your remarketing effort, here are 3 tips to ensure you are quick out of the gate and effectively delivering more sales opportunities (as measured by incremental opportunity conversions of qualified leads, in both % and $):

1. Develop several working templates - HTML v text, whitepaper v product trial v financial incentive, custom v general
2. Measure your delivery frequency - goal v actual, bimonthly v weekly
3. Integrate where possible with your other marketing tactics - is your marketing plan truly integrated?

And this all assumes that you code/track your lead sources and that you capture/integrate your leads directly to your CRM tool.

Hope this helps. More on remarketing in future posts. Speak with you soon. DC

Peace and Joy

May you find comfort and joy today in the greatest book of all time. Speak with you soon! DC

Imagine Leadership - Video

Another stellar video from Xplane. They are it.

Speak with you soon. DC

SEO Tip: URL Folder Structure for SEO

Other than title tags, site layout has yielded the best results for me(assuming you integrate with PPC). My top 3 tips:

• Use your Top 5 keywords in your naming conventions

domain.com/content1_keyword1/item1/

• Follow canonicalization rules

/keyword1/ and NOT keyword1/default.aspx

• Align web page names (and hence, urls) with PPC landing pages

subpage: domain.com/keyword1_content1/item1/

landing page: domain.com/keyword1_item1/

We’ve shot up dramatically in a very, very short period of time. Many of our top keywords are now Page 1 SERP #1-3. Hope it makes sense for you. Thoughts? Debate?

Speak with you soon. DC

Marketing SCRUM

I was exposed to this funny SCRUM term while working at a dev shop – I heard them referring to SCRUM but dont really recall seeing the progress.  As a VP, and as I understood the intent of SCRUM, I thought I would have been part of the prioritization team.  Alas. 

Recently, however, Ive seen SCRUM in action.  First, from an IT perspective, Ive seen it used to manage IT projects.  And lately, Ive rolled it out to my team to help prioritize and manage marketing campaigns.  Its early, but already very effective.  We are into our 2nd sprint, and here are three things Ive learned:

1. Determine your maximum story points AFTER you determine your monthly run rate of baseline activities (ie, reporting, existing campaign maintenance, etc.)
2. Prepare for piling on
3. Stick to your guns (especially in reference to #2)

If you follow these three things, you have a shot at completing your sprints and delivering value to the company.  With so much emphasis (and ignorance of the marketing process) on doing more with less, delivering value to your company is paramount to your individual and team success. 

Thoughts?  Input?  Id welcome it from Marketeers, Developers, and Project Managers!

Speak with you soon.  DC

Real SEO - Tags, Text, Links

Yes, it can work. I reworked all page titles and added key anchor text, all grounded in a few core keywords. Results? From "SERP >40" to "<5" on core keywords in less than 2 weeks. Really. Is your inhouse Team doing the same? How about your consultant? Its not bragging but more of a statement on the importance of focusing on relevant changes. Oh yeah, it helps to have a LOT of inbound links, but hey, thats the truly important part of effective SEO anyways -- and you cant get a third party expert to do that for you, so watch out.
Speak with you soon. DC

Page Titles and SEO

A recent internal discussion is prompting this posting.  In my opinion (thats all SEO really is, really), the page title weighs heavily in the algorithms of all the major search engines.  So to help you in your efforts, here's what to look for:

1. Include an accurate, keyword-rich page title of about 7 words
2. Exclude transition words (and, the, a etc.) in the title – they just waste space
3. Include a unique title for each page

Note that the title is the first and probably the only thing the searcher will look at in the search results, but having a keyword list as title might get you listed higher (if you're not penalized), but it's less likely to get clicked than a well structured title.

Consider this syntax:

In the HEAD section of the site add:

<title>Your Keyword-Rich, Descriptive Page Title Here</title>

Hope you find this useful.  Speak with you soon.  DC

Google Share = 73%

The Hitwise search stats for April are out. Do you need to revise your strategy? BTW, WHO is using Ask? Or MSN for that matter? What about your budget? Rememeber that you are already 1/3 of the way through calendar Q2.

Speak with you soon. DC

Top 10 Lead Generation Campaigns

As I’m counting my Q1 leads, I thought it would be worth sharing what’s worked for me recently.  My list includes (independent of cost) my Top 10 campaigns used to deliver QUALIFIED leads:

1. Referrals (by a wide margin)
2. Free user-relevant tools or free trials (not free giveaways)
3. SEO
4. Blogs (other tools likely, but insufficient data at this time)
5. eNewsletters
6. Webinars
7. PPC/SEM
8. Corporate newsletters
9. Customized direct mail
10. Customized email

Thoughts on my list?  Others that you’ve used?  Anyone have a comment on why my #1 isn’t yours?

Speak with you soon.  DC

Sun + ORCL = (Dead MySQL) ^ Dying Java

Too bad. But perhaps the chatter on the boards today is all wrong:

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=54328

http://java.sys-con.com/node/926455

http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2009/04/20/oracle-buys-sun-but-does-it-buy-open-source/

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=857

http://twitter.com/monkchips/statuses/1566758050

But alas, there’s always .Net and the rest of the legacy languages.

Speak with you soon. DC

Configured with Windows Live

In a world of tools, tools, and more tools, how can you not acknowledge the importance of Microsoft?  They are still relevant, so I’m not ignoring them.  Besides, MSFT Writer (from Windows Live) for Blogger is a nice admission that they understand collaboration AND openness.

Speak with you soon.  DC

A Laugh Gift - E*TRADE Golf Baby

My whole household still laughs at this one...and joy at home is a wonderful thing. Hope it helps you reset. Speak with you soon. DC

What Are Your Web Site Goals?

Do you even have any site goals? As I've been waist deep in this topic for some time now (ahem), its become even clearer to me that web design goals should be grounded in the fundamental business objectives of:

1. Awareness (Company, Products, Services)
2. Leads
3. Sales (Transactions)
4. Renewals (Visitors or Buyers) and/or Referrals

I did a quick search on the topic and was quite surprised to NOT find a similar list (one was kinda close) to the one I had in my brain, so I've posted this here. Hope it helps.
Speak with you soon. DC

8" in past 24hr

Breck for a few days. Hope you find your way to recharge and reset.

Speak with you soon. DC

Interactivity

2.0 at its best. The tools available continue to impress. This blog now feeds directly to twitter via twitterfeed. Check it out.

Speak with you soon. DC

How do you track your inbound links?

If you haven't used Site Explorer, you should. Its one of the best tools to monitor your inbound links, which are THE key metric for tracking your SEO progress (IMHO).

Speak with you soon. DC

Do You Understand Link Building, Keywords & Anchor Text?

We know the power (and importance) of link building. So while I was reading a few good SEO posts at seomoz, it reminded me that I promised a link building post of my own. Simply put, to build effective SEO, it’s important to be consistent when working on internal links, anchor text, and keywords. Perhaps an illustration will help convey my point.

Suppose you own a company that sells toys (with "toys" being the most generic word for the company’s products) and the company’s website is toysabc.com. Pick four keywords (KW) to drive your anchor text efforts.

The illustration below presents a suggested link structure, rich with anchor-text-laden keywords, that should help drive higher page rank scores and improve average times on your toysabc.com site.

Obviously, your architecture needs to support subpage folders and your Marketing Team still needs to complete the fundamental work in your keyword research efforts.

I hope this helps. Speak with you soon. DC

What's your page rank?

So you've completed your title tag changes (the most important ones, by the way). Did you remember to resubmit your site to the search engines? It may take a few days/weeks/months to see any gains, but dont fret - we changed our tags and improved PR from 5 to 6 in less than 30 days. Knowing that PR is based on a log scale, well, you can see how happy we are. See a comparative graphic and compare your site's PR to other well-known, high traffic sites. And consider what it will take SEO-wise to improve your score to your desired goal. Good luck.

Speak with you soon. DC